Managing change
The workplace can come with a daily dose of unexpected interactions and changes to priorities or expectations.
I got my autism diagnosis at 27 while working in a busy and growing (i.e. chaotic and changeable!) Tech company. I have since moved to an Analytics job in the Education sector. That means a slower pace, and more opportunities to work independently.
Which suits me much better. The job is standard office hours, but I work from home full time in Scotland, travelling four or five times a year down to England for bigger meetings.
Although the job is better suited, it is certainly not change-free(!) Below I will share six things that help me handle change at work. Not everything will work for everyone, and you can think about what specific tips or adaptations would apply to the daily challenges you face.
- Allowing myself time to adjust
When an unexpected change happens, e.g. a new piece of urgent work comes in, something gets cancelled, or there is an urgent meeting that needs to happen, the first thing I now do is stop.
In the past, I’d have tried to just work through it, not acknowledge the anxiety, and end up in a complete spin by the end of the day for “no reason”. Now, I let myself stop and adjust. That could mean stepping away from my desk for five minutes, taking a couple of breaths, or just sitting and running through the new schedule in my head.
Often a change means needing to adjust my work priorities. So, once the initial anxiety has subsided, I always allow myself the time to reprioritise before carrying on with whatever I was doing before.
If I can’t compute doing this by myself, I ask my manager to be a sounding board. Sometimes it is easier for her to see e.g. a meeting that I could cancel to make space, or a piece of work that is less urgent and can wait. If it’s a big change that will have a knock-on effect on other work, she usually offers to contact stakeholders about delays on my behalf. I don’t always take her up on that, but sometimes it helps to have a “buffer” between me and the stakeholder, if I’m feeling overloaded.
- Allowing a gap before responding to a change
Related to the above, but where a change requires a response, I make sure to wait until that “adjustment time” has passed. Else my response will always be a bit panicked and defensive. Without this pause, I tend towards saying that things are impossible or impractical when really it’s just that I can’t compute the change in the moment.
- Refusing to change when the impact on me is bigger than the impact on them
For example, when someone says “could we do this at X time instead, no worries if not”. If they are giving a choice, and that change would impact me negatively, I now try to avoid my “people pleasing” instincts. I tell them no. My needs matter too, and if it genuinely doesn’t matter much to them, then we should stick to the plan!
- Reducing the risk of a last-minute change
Prevention is better than cure! To lower the risk of last-minute changes, I try to get as much out in the open with my stakeholders as early as possible.
For example I always:
- Set an agenda for a meeting in advance so that people are prompted to give notice of a change
- Check requirements well ahead of time with stakeholders, write them down somewhere shared, and ask them to check, so we are all clear on expectations. This avoids any last-minute “Oh, I thought you were going to include X / do Y”
- Have a recurring “upcoming work” meeting with another senior member of the Data Team, where we check we are agreed on how things will run within the team for the next six weeks or so. We can then flag anything that looks like it might need to change well ahead of time
Most of this is basically just good project management… so, people don’t seem to notice that it is a “thing” I am doing because I’m autistic.
- Asking “Why?”
Some amount of last-minute change is pretty much inevitable. The world rarely runs exactly according to my carefully orchestrated plans…
One thing that helps me a lot when someone makes a change, is if they explain why. If I can understand why, I am much more able to adjust and much less likely to be annoyed about it!
On this point, it helps if people understand why I’m asking. The other things I do to handle change are less noticeable to others, but asking for detail on the reasons behind minor changes isn’t necessarily expected. (Not that this need stop you!) Everyone I work with knows about my diagnosis, so asking for extra details about a change doesn’t feel like a big deal. Having said that, I appreciate not every workplace is so understanding around disclosure – so that might not suit everyone. Employment Autism has information about disclosing at the bottom of their page here.
- Budgeting time in my week for ad hoc things
I only plan to fill 80% of my time in a given week. There is always something that comes up unexpectedly. If I plan to fill 100% of my time, then those “something”s will always mean either ditching something on my plan or working extra hours. Neither of which are enjoyable. So, to avoid my plans being thrown off when something new comes in, I plan four days’ worth of work in any given week. The rest always gets filled in with something.
Closing thoughts
Understanding that change is hard has given me a choice. I can either ignore that fact, and build up a lot of anxiety… or, I can give myself a bit of time to process, and do things to minimise the chances of it happening in the first place.
A lot of these things apply to non-work scenarios too.
May 2023
